AMD Ontario performance numbers leaked

Raw performance figures for AMD's first Fusion based product, the upcoming Ontario processor, have been leaked and frankly things are looking pretty good.

The story originates from German site Hardware Infos which seems to have gotten its hands on a leaked specification table that shows the Ontario based accelerated processing unit (APU) to be capable of 1.352 GFLOPS of floating-point performance. To put this in context this is just over twice the performance of an Intel Atom D510 CPU, but falls 15 per cent short of a low power Athlon II X2 250u. The leaked performance figures also suggest the APU contains a curious 488kB of cache.

While it’s disappointing that AMD’s new architecture seems to be beaten out by a processor based on the ageing K10 architecture its worth remembering that Ontario based APU’s are reported to operate at only 18W and include a DirectX 11 graphics core to boot. This compares favorably to the 25W Athlon II X2 250u draws (which, don’t forget, will also require an additional graphics chip) and certainly points to Fusion being able to take the fight to Intel in terms of performance per Watt.

Intel's Atom D510 meanwhile only draws 13W, but it's looking very much worth the extra 5W for the performance and graphical wizardry that the Ontario APU offers.

These figures are broadly in line with AMD’s early claim that its Bobcat based Ontario APU core would feature 90 per cent of 2010's mainstream performance in just 50 per cent of the die area. Obviously the accuracy of this claim depends where you draw the line for "mainstream" though.

Unfortunately, consumers won't be able to buy a boxed retail Ontario APU as it’s a BGA only chip and so has to be soldered directly to a PCB. Hopefully we might get a couple mini-ITX or similar small form factor boards with the CPU built in though.

What do you think of these early performance numbers? Let us know your thoughts in the forums.

Earlier in the week, we chatted to Intel ahead of next month's Intel Developer Forum to discuss some of its future products... Nehalem and Larrabee to be specific. It looks like 2009 and onwards will see all the major players fight on multiple fronts.